The Graduate Certificate in Public Management is a 15 credit hour program of study. The certificate program is flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of pre-career and in-service individuals.
Graduate students in other disciplines can use the program to supplement their primary fields with course work in public management, possibly using the certificate courses as part or all of a doctoral or master’s degree minor.
Career employees of public and private sector agencies seeking courses in public management, and especially those changing from professional or technical roles to managerial roles, find the certificate program beneficial.
Curriculum
The 15 hour certificate consists of four required courses and one elective.
Required classes (12 credit hours; choose four classes)
Analysis of concepts, methods, and procedures involved in managing public organizations. Problems of organization, planning, decision-making, performance evaluation, and management of human resources are considered. Cases are drawn from a variety of public services found at federal, state, and local levels of government.
An examination of the role of public affairs professionals in policy processes. Focuses on relationships with political actors in various policy areas.
Students will learn the skill of interest-based negotiation through role-play and simulation. Students will learn about dispute resolution techniques such as mediation, arbitration, fact-finding, early neutral evaluation, ombudsmanship, and facilitation. The course covers dispute resolution in the federal government and in the context of public, environmental, labor, and business disputes.
The fiscal role of government in a mixed economy; sources of public revenue and credit; administrative, political, and institutional aspects of a budget and the budgetary process; problems and trends in intergovernmental fiscal relations.
Analysis of the structure, operations, and design of public personnel systems, including government agencies and public enterprise. Relationships between public policy and personnel concepts, values, and operations are considered.
The course offers an in-depth examination of factors that contribute to successful executive leadership practice in a wide variety of organizational settings. Topics include what leadership is, what impact leadership has, and how leaders use various approaches and powers to achieve their goals.
Explores and applies theoretical and empirical research from a management perspective on workforce diversity. Topics include theories and constructs pertaining to diversity in work organizations, organizational postures toward workplace diversity, the interface between heterogeneity, work processes, and management practices; and the effects of heterogeneity on work-related outcomes.
Elective (3 credit hours)
Choose one additional O’Neill graduate public affairs course, which cannot include independent research studies, readings, or internship classes.
This course focuses on the interaction between the public, private, and non-profit sector to achieve consensus in decision making to influence federal, state, and local policies. The courses conveys theoretical and practical aspects of multi-sector collaboration to achieve more effective outcomes that each sector could individually conceive.
Provides an overview of theory and practice of organizational change. A particular focus hereby lies on organizational responses to the external environment as well as individual responses to organizational change.
